Baudelaire edits

Small correction to « Petits poëmes en prose » of Baudelaire at http://www.aule-browser.com/books/baudelaire-ppp.curl ( Curl "Surge" RTE browser plugin 7 or 8 required ; see www.curl.com )

Michael Hamburger on Hugo Friedrich

Over at aule-browser.com there should soon be pages allowing an easy comparison of Michael Hamburger and Hugo Friedrich.

In The Truth of Poetry (1969) I find these quotations, which I have somewhat abridged for the 'post' format:
[27]

Friedrich does tend to concentrate on a single line of development - that towards 'pure,' 'absolute' or hermetic poetry - and his academic specialization is in the Romance languages, in which that line of development has been much stronger than in the Anglo-Saxon, Slavic or Scandinavian language areas.[...]

Yet Baudelaire ... was a moralist as well as an aesthete; and it is the moral concerns of the non-hermeticists that have brought them back again and again to modes of poetic utterance that diverge from the line of development traced by Hugo Friedrich.

[28]

Hugo Friedrich puts all the stress on what he calls the "destruction of reality" in modern poetry, at least in as much as the lyrical word no longer proceeds from the unity of the poetry of the empirical self.

[...] I Rimbaud, too, Friedrich finds evidence of 'a process of dehumanization' characteristic of the development of modern poetry - but, one must object, only of that line of development which Friedrich chooses to pursue.

[p 29]

Friedrich himself quotes ... that 'poems are made not of ideas but words.' Ture, Friedrich also quotes ... 'After I had found nothingness I found beauty'; and there is no denying that a profound nihilism underlies the extreme aestheticism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

   It is the one-sidedness of Friedrich's view [that] 'To call a thing by name means to spoil three quarters of one's pleasure in a poem ...'
[...] or: "The modern poem avoids acknowledging the objective existence of the objective world (including the inner one) by descriptive or narrative elements.'

[p 38]

Contrary to what Hugo Friedrich has asserted, a very good case could be made for the special humanity of much modern poetry, a concern with humankind as a whole all the more intense for being

[p 59]

Although this unity was not necessarily one of what Hugo Friedrich calls the empirical self - he seems to assume that the confessional "I" of Romantic poetry was always identical with the poet's 'empirical self' and that this is identity is a norm from [...]

An internet presentation would be much more effective with the poets scrollable on  one screen and the two critics scrollable side-by-side or one above the other.

for W.B.Sinclair (WhiteDwarf Books)

Murphy blinkered by seven veils of his own selecting, the chair of his platonic cabinet a wheel not yet known to the Academy, rocks as does the sinking crescent moon as we promenade along a line of longitude against which is surveyed a rectilinear beach traversing the known globe with our western eyes.

Some son of Murphy, staring into the blue to first detect hilal, stricken by a headache so seizing his forehead he spends the next month in near total darkness thus being denied (or so she told him) a fine view of a rare and total eclipse, unexpected, unpredicted, like a brief death.

acute cité cesse cécité Cécile Celia ciel Stella scellé Cecilia cilia cils astral

points, orbs yet no circumference, a radius far too vast, radiant

[ <<La Muse malade>> et "Solaris" de Stani Lem ]

liens obscurs

green stars,
her emerald locks, lifted by the stream,
coiffure verdâtre

a bottle uncorked and that cork happily lost underfoot